Amazon wants to make life easier for Python developers

Mikael Ricknäs |
Aug. 21, 2012

Amazon Web Services has made it possible to roll out Python-based applications using Elastic Beanstalk, which aims to make it easier to deploy and manage applications in its cloud, the company said on Sunday.

Amazon Web Services has made it possible to roll out Python-based applications using Elastic Beanstalk, which aims to make it easier to deploy and manage applications in its cloud, the company said on Sunday.

Elastic Beanstalk, which is still in beta, automatically handles "all of the details associated with the provisioning of Amazon EC2 instances, load balancing, auto scaling, and application health monitoring," according to an Amazon blog post.

Applications and frameworks that run on the Apache HTTP Server and the Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) are supported. The latter is a specification that allows web servers and application servers to communicate with web applications.

IT departments can use the Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Tool to develop and deploy applications. The tool can be downloaded from Amazon's website. They can also use Amazon's Management Console to manage their applications.

Python developers can, for example, use Elastic Beanstalk to create an Amazon RDS database instance for use within an application. The database instance is automatically configured to communicate with the EC2 instances running the application.

To help debug problems, Elastic Beanstalk can also aggregate content from a number of different error logs, including the Apache error log.

To help developers get started, Amazon has created a developer guide which includes guides for Python frameworks Django and Flask, the company said.

In addition to Python, Elastic Beanstalk can also be used with applications based on PHP, Java, .NET, according to Amazon. But it won't end there: Amazon expects to support additional application types and programming languages in the future, it said.